The Need of
Assessment-Influenced Instruction:
A Journey to Promote EFL
Competencies for the Real World
Danny Wira Dharma
Recent discussions in the realm of EFL
instructions and assessment in Indonesia is gradually yet seriously shifting
focus from the (traditional) communicative competencies to specifically
described language competencies. Within this framework, English language
mastery is seen more as engaging in and completing the learning of
'quantifiable' competencies rather than as acquiring the creative core entities
of communication skills. To the real world, or workplace where our students
will eventually utilise the skills we are teaching and fostering in the
classroom today, this alteration is an answer to its long-awaited wish for real
EFL competent workers. A close look of the demands of the current (national and
classroom) curriculum and test on the one hand and a corpus-based description
of spoken and written language competencies used in the real world on the other
suggests that what we demand from our students and what our student as an
international speaker of English needs are really quite different.
To the academic world, this challenge calls
for we, English language teachers to align the pendulum of our instructional
activities in the classrooms to those meeting the criteria of the real world.
Not only this need affects the kinds of materials we develop for them and the
ways we address the instructions, it also compels us to align our paradigm in
regard to assessment. However, it is questionable whether current discussion of
assessment use are adequate for conceptualising the social and pedagogical
functions of assessments, which go well beyond the immediate, explicit reasons
for their use.
Through this paper I contend that we need
to shift from the propensity of aligning our language testing to our
instructional activities to a concept where instructions are influenced by end
assessment. I also argue that we need a better social theoretical model of the
context of assessment in order to understand the issue of assessment-influenced
instructions as the steps forwards to meet the complex English skill need in the
real world.
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Dharma, D. W. (2006,
December). The need of assessment-influenced instruction: A journey EFL
competencies for the real world. Paper
presented at the 54th TEFLIN International conference,
Website: www.geocities.com/eltindonesia
Email: eltindonesia@yahoo.com